Two Lebanese officials: Rifaat al-Assad, uncle of the ousted Syrian regime president, traveled from Beirut to Dubai

Two Lebanese security officials said on Friday that Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, had traveled from Beirut to Dubai in the past few days. The officials said that several members of the Assad family had traveled to Dubai from Beirut, while others had remained in Lebanon since Assad’s ouster on Dec. 8.

The two officials added that Lebanese authorities had not received requests from Interpol to arrest them, including Rifaat al-Assad. The two Lebanese officials said that the wife and daughter of his son, Duraid, were detained for trying to travel from Beirut airport on Friday with expired and tampered passports.

Rifaat al-Assad faces charges in Switzerland of war crimes and crimes against humanity over his leadership of a bloody crackdown on an uprising in 1982. The UAE’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. The two Lebanese officials said they did not know whether Rifaat or other members of the Assad family planned to remain in Dubai or travel elsewhere.

Rifaat, in his late 90s, is the brother of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. He led special forces that crushed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama in 1982, killing more than 10,000 people. In 2022, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent organization, said that between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians were killed in Hama.

The Swiss attorney general’s office has referred Rifaat al-Assad to trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the killings and torture in Hama, under the principle that all states have jurisdiction over such crimes. Rifaat has denied responsibility for the crimes. Earlier this month, Swiss judicial authorities said they had proposed cancelling the trial because of his poor health.

The 1982 Hama offensive has often been described as the model for Bashar al-Assad’s subsequent crackdown on the uprising that began in 2011 and toppled him this month. When rebel forces took control of Hama on Dec. 6, their commander, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the head of Syria’s new administration, said of the offensive that they had begun entering the city to “cleanse that wound” that had festered in Syria for 40 years.

Rifaat helped his brother Hafez al-Assad seize power in a coup in 1970, and served as vice president before unsuccessfully challenging his brother for power and fleeing the country. He has lived in Switzerland, Spain and France, where a court convicted him in 2020 of buying millions of euros worth of real estate using money diverted from the Syrian state. He returned to Syria in 2021.

Earlier this month, Lebanese Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi said that Assad’s top adviser Bouthaina Shaaban had left Beirut after entering Lebanon legally. In an interview with Al Arabiya, Mawlawi said that other Syrian officials had entered Lebanon illegally and were being pursued. Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Monday that Lebanon would cooperate with an Interpol request to arrest the regime’s former air force intelligence chief, Jamil al-Hassan, who is accused by US authorities of war crimes under Assad.

(Reuters)